The Elephant's Journey

The Elephant's Journey - Jose Saramago

This is a journey sustained on a humourous tension between telling the tale and dismantling it. Before we even start on the story proper, Saramago tells of it's genesis in the mural on the wall of a restaurant. So we know the book is the result of "a chance encounter", almost a whim.

This provisionality is a key element of The Elephant's Journey, not just the writing but the story itself. The story involves the sending of  Solomon the elephant from the King and Queen of Portugal in Lisbon to the Archduke Maxmillian of Austria (the Queen's cousin) who is in Valladolid and will then take Solomon on the Vienna. The idea of sending this late wedding gift is a whim, which the Queen almost regrets (but not quite). Solomon had been a great success on his arrival in Lisbon but now he is yesterdays news and languishes in filthy obscurity with his Indian mahout, Subhro (white). This is projected to be his future in Vienna, too: "there'll be a lot of applause, a lot of people crowding the streets, and then they'll forget all about him, that's the law of life, triumph and oblivion."

The Double

The Double - Jose Saramago

"an algebraic equation with people's faces where there should have been letters."

This is a book soaked in Mathematics. Indeed it reminded me forcefully of an occasion in my schooldays when I was asked to come to the blackboard and write out the proof of a theorem we were supposed to have learnt. The theorem was nice and concise but I hadn't learnt it. I may not even have looked at it and I had far more entertaining things to listen to in the classroom than the teacher. So I had to start from scratch and I filled the blackboard twice, following a number of hunches that brought me nowhere, before finally arriving at the proof. This was, of course, very amusing to the teacher.

Staying with half digested maths, it is my understanding that one of the many ideas in quantum mechanics is that anything that can happen, will happen. In this case the plot of The Double is not that farfetched. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, a history teacher who is suffering from mild depression is advised to watch a certain film by "his colleague, the Mathematics teacher." He watches the video and finds it unremarkable and as cliched as its title "The Race is to the Swift."